There are good reasons to seek another church: your child's attention span isn't one of them!

When frustrated parents come and say, "Our children don't get anything out of the service", how should we respond?  David Fitch has been doing some serious thinking about this.  He writes:

"...I get sad when I hear a parent tell me 'my children don’t get anything out of the service, we need to look a another church'. There are good reasons to seek another gathering of people. Mission is one of them, not a childs’ attention span. Don’t get me wrong eh? If the church as a whole is flat-out unengaging. If the church does not attempt to incorporate children into worship. If the church lacks hospitality for children, if the church itself is just another TV show passively consumed, then yes we have a problem here. Parents should should ask why and ask how we the pastors are leading the situation."

But when all else is equal, Fitch asks parents to consider the following ...
1) There’s an encounter with the living God here at our worship service. Your son/daughter need to be coached and prepared into that reality...
2) But discerning God is rarely immediately obvious. God is hidden. So your son or daughter and our church as a whole need to learn and be sensitized to discerning the presence of God. If we put God into sound bites or hyped up worship experiences, then your child will learn instinctually that church is the only place he or she can find God...
3) Children ultimately will follow or imitate their parents and those adults they can respect – therefore one’s children and how they are progressing can function as an excellent diagnostic for our own level of engagement with God. If we send our children to a more “passive” entertaining form of worship service, they will ultimately learn to become observers of the Christian faith not livers of the way of Jesus and His Kingdom...

Read the whole piece here.

HT:  Trevin Wax